A/N: As usual, I have no freaking clue what I've done. &I kind of hate this because I feel like it's a hundred different fanfictions attempted to pull together with some nonsense. I have trouble trying to be funny while writing in third person, I just like writing first person better (preferably Beck's), but I think POV changes are kind of lazy and should be avoided at all costs so I tried writing in third person but I don't know how I did. Meh. There's very mild swearing so I didn't really know how to rate this.
Oh, and it's really long. Like, really unnecessarily long. I don't know how that happened. I JUST HAVE SO MUCH TO SAY.
Hope you enjoy, though.
Beck and Jade trust the process. The process being that they get on each others' nerves, argue, one of them storms out and the other's too stubborn to go after them, they eventually make out and make up. Always the same annoying dance. They're never supposed to actually hurt each other, just really get as close to that as they possibly can without crossing the line.
But it's mid-term week and tensions are incredibly high- writing scripts and essays, editing music, practicing songs and scenes, and somehow studying algebra on top of all that.
There's really no time for arguing, but Beck and Jade know just how to push each other's buttons.
Jade's sitting on the floor of Beck's RV while he's on the bed, both of them surrounded by papers and books and just about to crack under the pressure of simply getting everything done.
Jade sighs, "Look, if push comes to shove, we can skip class Monday and finish everything."
"…What did you just say?"
Irritated, she replies, "I said we could skip class Monday; neither of us have any tests.""
"No, before that."
"…If push comes to shove?"
"Yeah, who the hell says that?"
"I say that!" when he gives her a misbelieving look, she insists, "…People say that!"
"No one says that!"
She gives him a dagger-shooting glare and gets back to homework.
The next fifteen minutes are silent until Jade thinks aloud, mumbling and not looking up from her papers, "Hey, have you ever thought about why cougars don't ever jump off of roofs of buildings and massacre people on the sidewalks?"
Beck pretends to look engaged, "You know, actually, I was just thinking that."
"Really!" she excitedly replies, her eyes looking hopeful.
"No. No one thinks that."
Her face falls and she's back to being irritated, "If the universe worked out right you'd be massacred by a cougar right now." she grumbles.
Another fifteen minutes later, she's reading over and revising an essay he wrote for history.
"This essay is rife with grammatical and linguistic inaccuracies." She says, tossing it back to him.
"…Rife? Since when am I dating a nun from a 1957 Amish nursing home?" He looks over all the red marks she made on his paper.
"Since when am I dating someone who writes like an eight year old!"
"You know, as a former eight year old, I resent that!"
"I swear to God, Beckett, you're a child."
"C'mon, babe, let's make out. Let's mouth kiss. Kiss me on my face place. For funsies?" he reaches down and puts a hand on her shoulder and she smacks it away.
"Charming. Ugh. Get off me."
Half an hour later and tensions are still rising, the air in the small RV getting hot and heavy with anger and stress.
"I swear to God, Beckett, if you don't stop tapping your pencil I will hit you with a big spoon."
"Technically, Jadelyn, this is a pen."
"Who cares about the schematics?"
"It's semantics."
"I'm not gonna let myself be corrected by an eight year old!"
Beck, trying to stay calm, sighs and rubs his forehead which is now prickling with the beginning of a headache, "Headaches, Jade, you give me headaches." His voice raises, "Why do you have to criticize everything!"
"What kind of question is that!"
"What kind of answer is that!"
Momentarily taken aback, Jade looks around to see they've both thrown their homework aside to stand up and yell at each other and wave their arms around.
"It's… It's this stupid RV you live in and everything in it, it's driving me crazy!" She pounds her fist on a tinted bulletproof window for added effect.
"Really? My RV's stupid now?"
"Yes!"
"Even the fish!"
"Especially the fish! I hate him! And his dumb name!"
"Don't talk about Swim Shady like that!"
"Sometimes, when you're asleep, I try and get him."
"I just don't get why you have to be such a damn sassy-pants smart-ass all the time!"
"I need to get out of here." Jade snaps while gathering her things off the floor.
"Where are you going? Are you gonna quantum leap back to 1939 and join the kids from the Sound of Music? Because you talk just like them."
"No! I'm going to go slaughter a goat or slash tires at the circus or whatever."
"You belong in a circus!" he yells to her, arms and eyes wide.
Jade's in the doorway of the RV, about to leave, and what comes next is the line that hurts.
"Y'know, if I wanted to talk to an asshole, I'd go talk to my father!"
Beck pauses, and his arms drop down to his sides. He blinks, and she sees that she's hurt him by the look in his eyes. It's gone by the time he blinks again, and she turns around and leaves, feeling the least bit guilty and mumbling curse words under her breath.
After what's just about the dumbest fight they'd ever had, Beck decided he, too, needs to get out of his RV, and goes into the kitchen of the main house when he receives what he thinks is a brilliant idea. He looks like he's furiously handling a jar of pickles when his father walks up to him, confused.
"…What are you doing?" he asks.
Beck replies flatly, "Jade was mean to me, so I'm being an ass."
"You look like you're trying to open a jar of pickles."
"No, I'm closing the jar of pickles really tight, so if Jade tries to open it she won't be able to and she'll have to ask me." Beck says with a satisfied grin.
His father raises an eyebrow in response.
"….Is that not good?"
"Don't pat yourself on the back too hard."
He sighs, "I just sort of suck at being mad at her. That's why I'm with her in the first place; she has a real… talent… for that."
"She sicked a dog on me."
"She did not."
"Whatever you say, just… keep her away from me. And out of my kitchen." He eyes the jar of pickles, takes it from Beck's hands and walks away with it.
Beck sighs again and tightly closes all of the jars of peanut butter for good measure.
Meanwhile, Jade's driven aimlessly around the neighborhood a countless amount of times, her homework still in a mess in the passenger seat. She gets frustrated and pulls into the parking lot of Mall-Mart. She's not exactly livid anymore, more like a controlled annoyance, so she gives a bored growl and smacks the back of the seat next to her.
With her jaw still locked and her eyebrows still pinned together at the middle, she pulls out her phone, her thumb hovers over Beck's name, but changes her mind and calls Cat.
"Helllooo-ooooo?" she answers her phone in her sickeningly sweet singsong voice.
"Hey. I'm sitting in the parking lot of Mall-Mart and I just had a big fight with Beck and I stormed out and now I feel bitchy and I don't want to go anywhere or eat anywhere or go home and I don't have any hobbies outside of Beck's RV and some toothless wino keeps knocking on my window."
There's a pause, then "…Who is this?"
"It's Jade. "
"Oh, hi Jade!"
"Hello." she replies, her voice laced with thick sarcasm she was sure Cat wouldn't notice.
"Do you wanna come over and eat ice cream with me!"
"No."
"Oh…" she sounds disappointed, then her voice regains hope, "Well, my brother got a new kitten, do you wanna-"
"No."
"…Oh."
"Just say what I taught you to say all the other times Beck and I are fighting. Do you remember what that is?" There's another long pause, and Jade, accustomed to Cat's mannerisms, says "Cat, I'm on the phone with you, I can't actually see you nodding your head."
"Oh… well, yes!"
"Say it now."
"You're right and Beck is being irrational and everything that comes out of his mouth is garbage."
Jade sighs, somehow feeling not any better at all when that's usually always worked. "Thanks."
"No problem!" Cat says excitedly, and Jade can hear her clapping her hands as she rolls her eyes and hangs up the phone, prepared to drive absentmindedly for the rest of the night if she has to.
It's two hours after she leaves when he gets the phone call. He's back in the RV, still fairly angry, and practically sneers when he sees her name on the caller ID. He wonders if she's calling to yell at him more, or apologise, the former more likely than the latter.
"Yeah?" is what he picks up the phone with, and sighs while running his fingers through his hair. He's still annoyed and he wants her to know that.
"I bulldozed a deer." she says, so boldly that he's sure she must be joking.
"Where the hell did you find a deer?"
"I don't know, but I hit one!" her voice is even more annoyed than his.
"Did it hit you back?" is his snarky response.
He hears her take a sharp inhale, another shaky breath, and his satisfied smirk drops instantaneously.
She rambles so fast he can barely understand her, "Please, Beck, I hit a deer and my mom's car windshield is broken and-… and I don't know what to do."
Beck's adrenaline kicks in and he quickly grabs his car keys and bolts out the door, "Are you okay? Are you hurt? Where are you? I'm coming to get you."
"I'm fine. I don't know what street I'm on but I just turned right out of Mall-Mart and drove like fifteen minutes and I'm right next to that stupid watch-for-deer sign. It's freaking taunting me, Beck, the deer I hit is right underneath it and it's just looking at me with it's eyeballs and-"
"Wait, is the deer dead?" He asks while the engine of his truck turns over.
"I DON'T KNOW, I'M NOT A DEER EXPERT!" she screams back into the phone.
"Okay, okay, I'll be there as soon as I can. Just try to calm down." He resists the urge to call her 'babe' because of course he's still angry at her, "I'm leaving right now. It'll be okay."
"Wait!-"she yells right as he pulls the phone away and is about to hit 'end', "Will you… will you stay on the phone with me until you get here?" she says in a small voice, "It's just- it's really dark out here, and… dead deer. You know… Looking at me."
"Sure." he replies, clenching his jaw so she can't hear that he's smiling. Jade who-can-always-hold-her-own West is actually scared, even if she won't admit it.
He drives as fast as he less then legally can, and the fifteen-minute phone call is relatively silent other than the sound of his truck's engine and her shaky breaths.
When he gets out of his truck, she looks at him, takes a deep, chest-heaving breath, then leaps towards him and throws her arms around him. He squeezes her tight and she buries her face in his chest, still trembling, and he thinks he feels a small sob catch in her throat.
"You sure you're okay?" he pulls away from her, places his hand under her chin to examine her face. He carefully wipes a drop of blood from the cut on her cheekbone and notices her eyes won't meet his.
Beck calls the police and they come and have to file a report, his arm wrapped tightly around her shaking shoulders while she fills out insurance information.
Once they're done with all the legal nonsense, Jade's mom's car gets towed and she sighs, pulls herself out of Beck's arms and carelessly crumbles into the passenger side of Beck's truck, slamming the door hard behind her.
"You want me to… take you home?" Beck asks softly after he gets in and starts the engine.
"Yeah." she replies in the same gentle tone. She's curled up in the seat as far away from him as possible, looking out the window and tapping leather with her fingers.
They drive in a quite uncomfortable silence until he parks in her driveway and turns off the truck.
"You think your mom'll be mad?" he asks, studying the side of her face as she looks in the other direction.
"Nah." she shrugs, putting her legs down from the dashboard and collecting her bag, "She's got insurance."
For a second they don't know what to say to each other, and then Jade softly places her hand on his, still on the gearshift.
Her eyes flick up at him and she smiles for half of a second before pulling her hand back, so quickly he wonders if it even happened as she gets out of the truck and he makes sure she's safe inside before pulling out of the driveway.
The Monday after, Jade asks Andre for a ride to school instead of Beck, ranting to him about everything that happened in the drive-thru for coffee. They get to school and she looks at him and lets out a nervous whine she sees Beck at his locker.
"Go fix your chiz!" Andre states before giving her annoying shove and heading to class.
She groans loudly in his general direction and approaches Beck at his locker, tapping his shoulder and looking down at her boots.
"Beck?" she says, surprisingly nervous.
"What's up?" he replies as he stands up and faces her, calm and cool and collected and all that garbage that always drove Jade crazy after an argument.
"Look, after our fight the other day, and… everything that happened after, I've been feeling kinda…" she waves her hand around, looking for the right word.
"Guilty?" Beck asks with a raise of his eyebrows.
"No…"
Suddenly Cat's red head pops up between the two of them, "Guilty?" she chimes in.
"Yes." Jade says while pointing at her, "Now go away."
Cat skips away.
"Anyway, I, uhh… made you this." She nervously rolls her eyes, reaches into her bag and pulls out a wrinkled, half-folded, half-assedly decorated piece of paper.
Beck looks at the front of the homemade card, where Jade has written "SORRY I'M SUCH A GRUMPY BITCH" in red crayon. The inside says "...SERIOUSLY." with a frowning face and a few lamely drawn hearts.
Beck looks at the card, up to Jade's wide-eyed nervous face, back to the card, and bursts out laughing.
"Tell me what's funny!" Jade snaps, her hands balling up into fists.
"I'm sorry, babe" Beck says, still laughing," It's just most of the time I think you're sharp as knives and then you do something like this and it just lets me know that you are such a freakin' pansy sometimes."
Jade's face turns red, but she's smiling and keeping herself from giggling. "By the way, that's filled with anthrax, you've got about thirty seconds."
Beck's eyes go wide as he promptly drops the card and jumps backwards.
"…I'm kidding!"
She receives a sarcastic smile as he puts an arm around her and they start walking down the hallway.
"So… we good?" She raises her eyebrows.
"More than good." he says, pausing for a second to kiss her sweetly on the mouth.
" 'Kay… now can we both adjust our bras and man up!" she slaps his chest and saunters away.
He yells over the crowded hallway with a smirk on his face, "You're the one with girl parts!"
"God, why do you have to talk like that!" She calls backwards to him.
"Well, why don't you know how to draw!" is his response as he storms after her and the whole process begins again.
...I don't even know if they have deer in California.
Oh, and happy bade week, everyone. Naturally the universe has chosen this week of all weeks to give me personal problems forcing me to make the decision to stay off tumblr virtually all week, but I expect the bade tag is practically having a group panic attack. It'll be ok, guys, Trust the process.
Anyway, since Dan's pretty much confirmed Beck and Jade will be getting back together, I suppose it's just a matter of how long it takes. I don't think it'll be in the same episode, simply because that's been done before, but if he makes us wait until like, the SERIES finale I'll probably be a bit furious. We'll just have to wait and see, but I will never stop writing bade fic. ;)
By the way- Swim Shady. Awesome name for a fish.